Saturday, July 29, 2017

I have been wanting to put together groupings of figures to fit a B/X or other old-school D&D game for a while now, sort of like the old Grenadier figure boxes you could buy in the early 80's. One of their boxes was "Female Adventurers" so I decided to round out my collection of female adventures that I have done so far with a female dwarf and female halfling, giving me one each of all the possible B/X classes. Unlike more modern games, where the halfling is almost always an achetypal thief, in B/X D&D the halfling wears the same heavy armor (or could wear) as a fighter or cleric. I put mine in chainmail with leather shoulder pieces just for fun, and decided to go with a spear as this seems to make the most logical sense of melee weapon choice for one who is going to be shorter and have poorer reach than almost all the enemies she would face. Of course for the dwarf, I had to go with an axe, but she is no dummy and wanted the benefit of a shield for defense, so I went with a one-handed axe.

Nothing too new construction wise. The dwarf is made with a flat tapered plug and a split long bead as shoulders. The head is a small bead, arms, feet, armor plates, and axe are tile spacers, shield is the small precut round wooden craft piece. Halfling has a body made from a long bead, everything else is the same as the dwarf except no shoulder piece, the arms are tile spacers and so are the shoulder armor plates. Both have paper skirts that flare out a bit representing the bottom of the chainmail shirts they are wearing.

I'm really happy with both figure's hair, though, especially the dwarf. I wanted it to be more "flowing" like she was in mid swing, and I'm pretty happy with the results. The paper can be hard to "tame," but like anything else, the more I work with it the better the results get. There is a slight variation on the halfling figure for the feet. If I left the tile spacer full thickness, it made the halfling too tall; she would have been as tall as the dwarf. So I split the feet in half (which wasn't easy, but it wasn't too bad) to make her a little shorter. This is actually easier to see in the last picture below.

The back of the figures is usually boring and this is no exception, but I wanted to show the figures from both sides.

And here are the three possible B/X female adventurers, a dwarf, elf, and halfling, ready for adventure! When I get another female fighter done, I'll post a picture of the "boxed set" 8-figure version of these female adventurers, with one of each B/X class except for the fighter which will have two figures ... because you can't have too many fighter figures!

Saturday, July 22, 2017

I liked the first kobold that I did, but I wanted to have another go. He was a bit too tall and stocky and I thought the problem was that I used a shoulder piece for him and that it was not needed. I also wasn't a fan of the ears. So I did two more test kobolds. Here they are.

And from the other side.

The one with the swords left arm is a bit too short, but other than that I like how these guys came out.

Now here they are compared to the original kobold test figure.

The only differences in construction are that I used tile spacers for the ears so that they were shorter, and I did not use the split bead for a shoulder piece. As you can see with these guys, it just isn't needed, and the figure looks much more slight and it isn't nearly as tall as the first kobold figure I did. I also came up with a better way to do the tails, which look a lot better I think. I used a thin strip of paper, glued it into place, and then covered it with hot glue. Gives a nice tail appearance, and now I think I'm going to do another otyugh at some point using this technique for the tentacles.

This is a good lesson though, meaning that it is not very often that I hit upon the ideal way to construct these guys first try. Takes some practice and re-engineering often with all of these wooden figures. But, that's a lot of the fun of it too.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

I think Dale may have already posted about this a while back, but today while I was randomly walking around Jo Ann Fabrics (waiting for another store to open) I found these premade wooden trees that are of a really good size for the figures I do (roughly 30mm or so tall). Here is a picture of them in the package.

They appear to be made in China (shocker!) distributed by a company in Florida called Sparrow Innovations, Inc. I haven't tried to find them online to see if they have other cool things or not.

They were a little pricey, about $2.25 per tree, but that's not so bad considering all you have to do is paint them and they are done. They already have a serviceable base on them.